Sustainability Of Protected Areas Research Articles

Examining the Mediating Effect of the Rural Economic Dynamization between the Socio-Environmental Heritage and Sustainability of Protected Areas

This study examines the mediating effect of rural economic dynamization between socio-environmental heritage and the sustainability of protected areas in the buffer zone of the Serranía de las Quinchas Regional Natural Park, located in the municipality of Otanche, Boyacá Department, Colombia. The study population includes families that are part of the productive units in this area. The methodological approach of this study is based on partial least squares structural equation modeling. The working unit was established in the regional protected areas of Colombia, specifically in the Serranía de las Quinchas Regional Natural Park. A sample of 172 participants was selected using a non-probabilistic intentional sampling method, covering academics, company representatives, social leaders, local authorities, and representatives of non-governmental organizations. The study variables were measured using a scale with satisfactory psychometric properties, which included 12 items for socio-environmental heritage, 17 items for rural economic dynamization, and 11 items for the sustainability of protected areas. These were structured into subcategories based on the ecosystem services approach (factors that demonstrate social and economic dynamics). Responses were collected using a five-point Likert scale. The sample was analyzed using SmartPLS 3.3.3 software, applying a reflective–reflective hierarchical component model to evaluate the first- and second-order relationships among the variables. The results demonstrate the importance of socio-environmental heritage for local communities as a strategic component that facilitates the rural economic dynamization of protected areas based on sustainability. This research contributes to understanding the relationship between socio-environmental heritage and the sustainability of protected areas, mediated by rural economic dynamization, highlighting the relevance of in situ conservation strategies and prospective planning of these territories to implement sustainability dynamics. It is concluded that rural economic dynamization acts as a significant mediator in the relationship between socio-environmental heritage and the sustainability of protected areas, emphasizing the need to integrate these dynamics into the management of natural resources and the promotion of sustainable development in rural communities.

Sustainable Development of Territories during the Period of Post-War Environmental Restoration

The aim of the article was to substantiate the transformations of the conceptual foundations of sustainable development of territories during the period of post-war ecological restoration of states. The main methodological tools were the methods of modelling, experiment, and morphological analysis. The research showed that countries faced a globally important task in the ecological restoration of territories in the post-war period. The destruction of the environment and its pollution caused by military actions sharply reduce the positive indicators of the state of the environment. It was proved that sustainable development goals act as effective vectors for improving the state of the environment in the period of post-war ecological recovery. The implementation of ecologically significant actions during the post-war ecological recovery in Bosnia and Herzegovina shows that this process is complex and difficult. The problems of contradictory decisions, corruption, and lack of transparency should be considered. The environmental strategy of BiH ESAP 2030+ of Bosnia and Herzegovina, developed by the SDG, can be an example of the corresponding legislative regulation in Ukraine. The UNDP’s project Sustainability of Protected Areas (SPA) implemented in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the context of popularizing ecotourism is also worth noting. A similar project can be implemented in Ukraine in the context of sustainable development of the country during the period of post-war ecological restoration. The main long-term problem in the territory of Ukraine is the demining of regions, which will also determine the terms of implementation of recovery procedures.

Sustainable protected areas: Synergies between biodiversity conservation and socioeconomic development

Abstract Reconciling conservation and socioeconomic development goals is key to sustainability but remains a source of fierce debate. Protected areas (PAs) are believed to play an essential role in achieving these seemingly conflicting goals. Yet, there is limited evidence as to whether PAs are actually achieving the two goals simultaneously. Here, we investigate when and to what extent synergies or trade‐offs between biodiversity conservation and local socioeconomic development occur. To explore these relationships, we collected data across a wide range of socioeconomic settings through face‐to‐face survey with PA managers from 114 African and European PAs using structured questionnaire. We found synergies between biodiversity conservation and socioeconomic development for 62% of the PAs, albeit with significant differences between African (55%) and European PAs (75%). Moreover, the sustainability of PAs in conserving biodiversity was strongly correlated with the empowerment of the PA management and the involvement of local communities in PA planning and decision‐making processes. Our results demonstrate that for PAs to promote synergies between biodiversity conservation and local socioeconomic development, and to enhance their long‐term sustainability, they should invest in the empowerment of their respective management and involvement of local communities in their planning and management activities. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Spatial and Temporal Change of Land Cover in Protected Areas in Malawi: Implications for Conservation Management

Protected areas (PAs) transform over time due to natural and anthropogenic processes, resulting in the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. As current and projected climatic trends are poised to pressurize the sustainability of PAs, analyses of the existing perturbations are crucial for providing valuable insights that will facilitate conservation management. In this study, land cover change, landscape characteristics, and spatiotemporal patterns of the vegetation intensity in the Kasungu National Park (area = 2445.10 km2) in Malawi were assessed using Landsat data (1997, 2008 and 2018) in a Fuzzy K-Means unsupervised classification. The findings reveal that a 21.12% forest cover loss occurred from 1997 to 2018: an average annual loss of 1.09%. Transition analyses of the land cover changes revealed that forest to shrubs conversion was the main form of land cover transition, while conversions from shrubs (3.51%) and bare land (3.48%) to forest over the two decades were comparatively lower, signifying a very low rate of forest regeneration. The remaining forest cover in the park was aggregated in a small land area with dissimilar landscape characteristics. Vegetation intensity and vigor were lower mainly in the eastern part of the park in 2018. The findings have implications for conservation management in the context of climate change and the growing demand for ecosystem services in forest-dependent localities.

Enhanced Shared Governance Improves the Collaborative Management of Protected Areas in Zimbabwe

A majority of protected areas are not being managed effectively enough to ensure the perpetuity of biological resources they contain due to impediments such as poor governance. This study focused on the experiences in the shared governance of people involved in partnership-managed protected areas and also on developing critical success factors in implementing such partnerships. The interpretivism approach was appropriate for this qualitative, inductive, descriptive, and exploratory three-case study that used in-depth interviews and open-ended quester-views with a purposive sample to generate data. In the early stages of the projects, the protected area shared governance was not stable and was characterized by many pitfalls because the concept of partnerships was new in Zimbabwe. It is important to develop guiding frameworks and build capacity that eliminates governance vacuum, ambiguity, deficiencies, overcrowding, redundancies, bureaucracy, and politics from the early stages of the partnerships. Community participation is crucial in the management and long-term sustainability of protected areas in developing countries. Further, governance reforms for the protected areas needed to recognize traditional and cultural sites in the project areas and develop governance types of the sacred sites formally attributed to the local ethnic indigenous people nested within project shared governance. Some critical success factors of well-shared governance of protected areas are in the text. However, all the principles of good governance may not be usable in one case study

Sustainability of protected areas: Vulnerabilities and opportunities as revealed by COVID-19 in a national park management agency

Protected areas (PAs) play a critical role in safeguarding Earth's biodiversity and contributing to human wellbeing. Maintenance of ecological intactness, financial viability and social relevance influence PA sustainability. We explore how COVID-19 and associated lockdown regulations influenced the sustainability of South Africa's largest PA management agency. Quantitative and qualitative information, sourced from ongoing monitoring, organizational reports, questionnaires and discussions with agency staff, were used to make sense of the challenges and opportunities. In the short term, lockdown regulations limited people's ability to access benefits from PAs with 50,000 educational visits lost between April and June 2020 and recreational visits in access-controlled national parks decreasing by ~96%. Consequently, tourism revenue dropped by 90% highlighting the fragility and risk of single primary income stream reliance. This resulted in loss of community development revenues and implementation of cost curtailment measures. Increased anxiety regarding health and job security impacted employee morale and complicated operational challenges. Navigating this period required good communication, re-prioritisation and adaptive responses by park managers. Whilst we report on short-term impacts and responses, lagged and longer-term impacts are anticipated. The pandemic highlighted the interconnectedness of people and ecosystems and the complex interdependencies between the sustainability principles which must be considered for increased PA resilience and sustainability.

Influence of Logos on Social Attitudes toward the Landscape of Protected Areas: The Case of National and Natural Parks in Spain

This study is the first analysis of the influence of the design of the logos of the National and Natural Parks of Spain on social attitudes toward these protected areas (PAs). The effect of certain elements in the logo of a PA on its attractiveness and on support for its conservation was explored through a questionnaire survey of groups of university students. The respondents were asked to choose between different park logos, using three main criteria: tourist interest, conservation priority, and willingness to pay for conservation. The results showed a higher preference for PAs whose logos include animals and a lower preference for those with heritage elements. No significant differences were found in terms of types of university programs. The results suggest that greater attention should be paid to the role of iconographic elements in considerations of the protection and management of landscapes. This study adds to our understanding of the social mechanisms that influence the interest of the public in Natural and National Parks. These results can be used to increase the involvement of the general population in conservation goals, contributing to the social, economic, and environmental sustainability of PAs.

Making conservation sustainable under unfavourable conditions: the case of Chimanimani National Reserve, Mozambique

ABSTRACT Based on a case study from the Chimanimani National Reserve in Mozambique, this article analyses to what extent different types of operational practices can contribute to the sustainability of protected areas in relatively unfavourable external conditions. While current conservation policies highlight community participation and market-based approaches, the same “best practices” are not equally valid under different conditions. Where unfavourable natural conditions, lack of infrastructure, difficult access and political instability limit the potential for upmarket ecotourism, actors should focus on community empowerment, diversification of livelihoods, and building joint conservation ideology, where they have direct influence through operational practices.

Governance, Participation and Local Perceptions of Protected Areas: Unwinding Traumatic Nature in the Blouberg Mountain Range

Local perceptions of protected areas are important for conservation and the sustainability of protected areas. We undertook qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork to explore relationships between people and protected areas in the Blouberg mountain range, South Africa. The history of land use and current relationships with protected areas reveal legacies of marginalisation and immiseration, giving credence to a theory of traumatic nature. The impacts of traumatic nature manifest themselves in local discourses and narratives of nature, protected areas and conservation.

Tracing the cost/benefit pathway of protected areas: A case study of the Kruger National Park, South Africa

The sustainability of protected areas is dependent on societal support. Protected area relevance (meaning and value) to society is based on vested interest grown through conservation related benefit accrual that outweighs costs. Protected areas generally don’t report on their total societal impact in part due to a lack of an appropriate framework that accounts simultaneously for positive and negative, tangible and intangible components. We develop a framework and pathway that (1) includes ecosystem dis-services provided by protected areas, and (2) provides a tool for protected area managers to report on benefit sharing as a whole towards managing cost-benefit trade-offs. Ecosystem services and products from Kruger National Park were classified into themes, followed by a quantitative inventory of cost/benefit processes for the KNP. We demonstrate the skewed nature of costs versus benefits, with most beneficiaries living far from the park. Most local residents receive few benefits and are often recipients of costs. The framework highlights the need to understand the impact of benefit sharing on human well-being; the lack of an understanding of the outputs and outcomes from direct ecosystem service flows from parks; and the need for an understanding of the links between benefit accrual and conservation-related outcomes.

The ecotourism-extraction nexus and its implications for the long-term sustainability of protected areas: what is being sustained and who decides?

Some conservationists assert that multiple-use protected areas can accommodate competing claims for resource use, including extraction (e.g. mining and fisheries) and in-situ use (e.g. ecotourism). This is despite a growing number of studies showing how communities struggling with poverty, isolation, economic stagnation and environmental degradation experience limited benefits from ecotourism. This paper examines opposing claims over resource use (mining and ecotourism) in a World Heritage site in El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve, Mexico. It explores the idea that institutional processes can dis-incentivize both income generation from ecotourism and conservation if inequitable access to resources is not remedied. The article illustrates how ecotourism's contribution to socio-economic development of local communities can be circumscribed by: (1) the historical patterns of resource use; (2) misdirected interventions by state actors; (3) duplicitous actions of multi-national corporations, and (4) opaque governance processes with limited accountability. Findings support arguments that the capacity of ecotourism to reduce inequitable access to resources is limited and highlight why ecotourism cannot substitute for genuine institutional reform in protected area designation and management.Key words: ecotourism, participation, El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve, Mexico, neoliberal conservation, sustainable development, equity

Living on the edge: benefit-sharing from protected area tourism

Tourism in protected areas not only plays an essential role in terms of contributing to the financial sustainability of protected areas but through effective and efficient benefit-sharing can posit...

Assessing the economic sustainability of managing protected areas using the CVM and CBA approaches

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to design a preservation policy aimed at safeguarding the Ehden Natural Reserve, a reserve providing shelter to a substantial number of endangered species. Design/methodology/approach – The current paper, offers an approach which merges contingent valuation and cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to design a preservation policy aimed at safeguarding the reserve. Contingent valuation is used to estimate the expected benefits from the reserve for both local residents and tourists visiting Ehden, while using a certainty analysis approach to explore the problem of hypothetical bias. A CBA is then applied to the findings to evaluate a ten year plan to preserve the protected area through a non-profit foundation. Findings – Findings from the analysis support the feasibility of a project of this nature, which shows a positive NPV within the studied period and at an acceptable social discount rate (SDR). The balance between benefit and cost is thus always positive, except in some pessimistic cases when analyzing the sensitivity of the model’s critical variables, particularly the number of visitors, the different WTPs for visitors and locals and the different SDRs. Originality/value – The paper adds to the scarce research available on the sustainability of protected areas in the Middle East region.

Payoffs Versus Process: Expanding the Paradigm for Park/People Studies Beyond Economic Rationality

The sustainability of protected areas relies heavily upon their abilities to broker positive relationships with local populations. A good deal of mainstream conservation efforts today are still based primarily within a dominating paradigm of economic rationality, best exemplified within Garrett Hardin's classic 1968 treatise on the tragedy of the commons. Strategies based upon this paradigm, which tend to characterize local residents as rational actors aiming solely to maximize anticipated benefits versus potential costs, have met considerable resistance from local actors. They have thus often failed to achieve conservation goals. This is not because people do not think rationally or economically. Rather, it is because individuals' analyses of the costs and benefits associated with protected areas are only one part of the process through which they formulate their reactions to them. Interviews and participant observation with local residents living in and around three national parks—Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina, United States; Virgin Islands National Park in the U.S. Virgin Islands; and Podocarpus National Park in Loja and Zamora-Chinchipe, Ecuador—reveal that individuals' evaluations of other social factors, including trust, empowerment, and peer group attitudes, can overpower economic or other rational concerns in decision-making processes. This article discusses these findings and some of their implications for protected areas management.

Progressing the Evaluation of Management Effectiveness for Protected Areas: Two Australian Case Studies

Protected areas have long been of central interest to those concerned about the environment. Over recent decades, this interest has shifted from acquisitions and additions to the global protected area system, to concerns regarding their management and management effectiveness. This paper contributes to the growing interest among researchers and policy makers alike in developing and applying evaluation methods to report on the effectiveness of this management. We applied the recently developed World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) evaluation framework to two national parks in Australia to further contribute to our understanding both of the framework's usefulness and the effectiveness of visitor management. A specific focus on visitor management is a new addition to this framework, as is surveying both visitors and managers to provide evaluation data. The results showed that site management was effective in reducing visitor impacts. In contrast, the effectiveness of managing visitors themselves, specifically through providing information related to minimizing impacts, was less certain. The WCPA framework provides a practical basis for designing and undertaking evaluations of the effectiveness of visitor management, with such management being essential for the long-term sustainability of protected areas

Tourism, an ecological approach in protected areas: Karagöl-Sahara National Park, Turkey

Protected areas are important potential areas from the point of view of ecological tourism because of their natural, historical and cultural richness. In this study, the environmental sustainability of protected areas has been investigated within a sample of the Karagöl-Sahara National Park in Turkey. This national park has, so far, had little exposure to recreational and tourism activities. However, an increase in the number of tourists visiting the park has been observed as a result of the demands of ecological tourism. This area was investigated with respect to ecological planning to prevent intensive usage from causing future damage, as a result of human thoughtlessness, and to protect the park. Additionally, the aim was to determine the usage potential using ecological planning and to propose variations of ecotourism thought to be helpful for the public. The Karagöl-Sahara National Park has valuable natural and cultural resources, and is an area whose recreation-tourism potential has been strongly protected. The national park also has major economic potential for ecotourism.

Ecodevelopment planning at India‘sGreat Himalayan National Parkfor biodiversity conservationand participatory rural development

The existing network of Protected Areas (PAs) in India is the major effort aimed at biodiversity conservation at the national level. The sustainability of PAs is heavily influenced by local people who are largely dependent on natural resources (fuel, fodder, minor forest products) for their livelihood. While all PAs are surrounded by historically resource-dependent communities, several of them have villages within their core areas, too. This has necessitated an alternative approach to natural resource management which aims to integrate the interests of conservation with those of the nearby resource dependent communities. The case of the Great Himalayan National Park illustrates and incorporates the lessons from Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) implemented elsewhere in the world.